Light How We Got to Now with Steven Johnson

Imagine some alien civilisation observing Earth

for the last 100,000 years.

The emergence of artificial light

would be the single most dramatic change in our planet's appearance.

But who are the people that took us out of the dark

and into the light?

OK, there we have a spout!

An 18th-century skipper discovers a source of light in a whale.

-They put a kid inside the whale's head?

-Right.

There's a social do-gooder who illuminates the plight of the poor.

He actually set fire to the tenements

he was trying to photograph.

And a French sci-fi fan playing with gases hits the jackpot.

He decides to pass a current of electricity through them.

ELECTRICTY CRACKLES

These are classic examples of the kind of people

who actually made the modern world -

people you've probably never heard of.

These are hobbyists, garage inventors, obsessive tinkerers...

..ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

The thing I love about these pioneers of light

is that they didn't just make our world a brighter place,

but they also set in motion an amazing chain reaction of ideas.

Creating innovations that go on to affect every aspect of our lives...

CAR HORNS TOOT

..from manufacturing and architecture...

..to homewares and entertainment.

I want to show how these seemingly unconnected worlds are linked

by the unsung heroes of light.

All my career I've been fascinated by ideas and innovation,

from writing books about the great British innovators

of the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution

to my work with Silicon Valley start-ups, and what I've learned

about innovation is that the experiences of the past

are still the best road map for our future,

and that's why I want to tell you the story of How We Got To Now.

My exploration into the chance encounters

and unexpected discoveries

that would bring light to the world begins...

in the bath.

We live in such a bright and artificially lit world,

for many of us, there's a desire to return

back to a low-light environment.

And that's why when we want to relax,

we surround ourselves now with an ancient technology,

the humble candle.

Candles provide the simplest form of artificial light

and we've been making them for thousands of years.

Despite their ancient origins,

today they lie at the heart of a multi-billion-dollar industry.

But that wasn't always the case.

Today's sweet-smelling aromatherapy candles are symbols of luxury,

but just a few centuries ago,

candles would have had the opposite effect.

Ordinary people made their own candles in an arduous process

that involved rendering rancid animal fat,

and when they finally lit them up indoors, they filled the rooms

with smoke and noxious fumes.

But all this was going to change.

To create a light that was both clean and bright

would take a chance encounter in the most unlikely of places.

Back in 1659, here on the island of Nantucket,

off the coast of Massachusetts,

a group of English settlers set up a small farming community.

But it was out at sea they would make their name

in the story of light.

-Morning.

-Good morning, how are you?

-Very good.

-Welcome aboard.

-Thank you very much.

The farmers would soon discover a new source of artificial light.

It may sound completely bonkers, but it lay within the body of a whale.

What's the likelihood that we're going to see something?

You never know, it's a big ocean out there and, er,

depending on how well, you know, it's always good to have a lot of eyes

concentrating on the horizon, looking for spouts.

Whales were very common in this area, coming here

to feed in the nutrient-rich waters.

Today they're a much rarer sight,

so whale watchers are a superstitious bunch.

There's a ritual here that the whale spotters like to use

to encourage the whale to come out.

They throw a blue M&M into the sea

to elicit the appearance of the mighty beast.

So I'm going to do this, this is actually a historic tradition.

I believe there is a scene in Moby Dick where they do this.

All right, here we go.

All right. Show yourselves!

OK, there, we have a spout.

Yeah, I see it! Look at that, there it is.

Big puffy plume

off the surface of the water.

-I see the spout again.

-Yeah, very good.

-Now you got the hang of it.

-I could have been a whaler!

They have massive lungs.

-Yeah, look at that.

-Vapour erupts from their lungs.

Can you tell what kind of whale it is?

-Yeah, in this case we can tell it's a humpback whale.

-Really?

This individual is more than likely feeding.

Here it is diving. Watch the tail flukes go up,

-and down underwater.

-That is spectacular.

Before long, the settlers start hunting whales like this humpback,

creating one of America's first global industries.

The prize was the whale's blubber,

which could be used in everything from soap and cosmetics

to lubricants and medicines.

But it took a crazy encounter by a legendary Nantucketer

to bring a brand-new type of light to the world.

On one fateful day in 1712,

the story goes that a powerful nor'easter blew a Captain Hussey

well out into the deep waters of the Atlantic, out in this direction,

where he encountered a species of whale

that had never been seen before, a giant leviathan of the deep -

the sperm whale.

Sperm whales are the largest of the toothed whales,

growing to over 20 metres long.

They can be fierce and dangerous animals.

So what makes a sperm whale different

from other species of whales?

Well, first, they have teeth,

so they're off shore, they're diving deep

and they're huge animals, so to use those teeth,

they're using them on very large animals like giant squid.

Legend has it that Hussey would soon discover

these whales contained a unique type of oil, not found in other species.

And it was this oil that would go on to play a key role

in the story of light.

But first, he had to risk life and limb to catch one.

When a whale was spotted, they would lower the whale boats,

they would get in and they would start rowing, six men in this boat.

When they get very close to the whale,

then the harpooner takes up his harpoon, which looks like this.

You want to get very close to the whale, you can't throw it too far.

OK, so you're just, like, ten feet from this giant beast?

-Or maybe even closer.

-Wow.

And then you just take up that harpoon and you try to...

-spear it.

-So you're kind of hooking it?

-Yes.

-Right, right.

So, now the whale takes off swimming,

because he's been struck by this harpoon, and the line,

which is in this tub, is now paying out very fast

and you are racing across the ocean on the Nantucket sleigh ride.

And then eventually the whale gets tired,

cos he's pulling this heavy boat with six men in it behind him,

and when he starts to tire,

they'll pull in on the line again, get close to the whale again,

and now the officer might be in the bow, and he has a lance.

And you're just stabbing?

You're stabbing, so you stab probably several times

and turn it around, do as much damage as you can.

That would've been some ride.

At the peak of the whaling industry,

over 5,000 sperm whales were slaughtered each year.

Once they'd caught and killed one,

the carcass was processed out at sea.

It was here the whalers uncovered something truly bizarre

that changed the course of history.

When they hacked their way into this creature's massive head,

they found something they had never seen before -

a vast reservoir of an oily substance,

over hundreds of gallons of it.

They called it spermaceti because of its resemblance to seminal fluid.

Before long, spermaceti oil

would become one of the most valuable substances on the planet.

Extracting the spermaceti oil is a revolting and laborious business.

They made a hole in the top of the head

and then they lower the youngest, smallest person on board,

who's probably a 14-year-old cabin boy, into the head of the whale.

They put a kid inside the whale's head.

Right. He comes out with a bucket more of oil.

-This whale's been dead for days, probably, right?

-Probably, yeah.

It must have smelled appalling.

It did.

It didn't take long for some bright spark to see

if the spermaceti oil would burn.

And this triggers a revolution in artificial light.

Spermaceti oil burns with an unusually white bright light

without odour or smoke.

It's actually twice as bright as a traditional candle.

It's a simple design, really.

Just a wick suspended in a reservoir of oil.

But spermaceti lamps and candles

quickly became the most prized form of artificial light

in Europe and in America.

The demand for spermaceti oil goes through the roof,

pouring millions of dollars into the American economy.

Eager to protect their profits,

the Nantucket tradesmen come up with a brand-new business idea

and it's a practice still used throughout the world today.

By the late 1700s, spermaceti processing factories

have sprouted up all over Nantucket and even into the mainland.

And the owners get together

and form the United Company Of Spermaceti Chandlers.

And the organisation gives them the power

to keep newcomers from entering the market

and it also enables them to keep Nantucket whalers

from artificially raising the price of oil.

It's one of the first examples of monopolies

and price-fixing on record.

Spermaceti oil not only transforms the way we light our world,

it helps create innovations in the most surprising of places.

It's by the light of spermaceti lamps

that great authors like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson

and Jane Austen write their greatest works.

During the 1800s, it's spermaceti oil

that lubes the steam engines and locomotives

of the Industrial Revolution.

And it was still used in the gear boxes

of American automatic cars up until 1972.

And because it stays liquid even at sub-zero temperatures,

an urban myth took root that it was used in the Apollo 11 mission

to land on the moon.

Once we had bright lights, like spermaceti lamps,

there's an immediate impact on our lives.

It meant we didn't go to bed at sundown.

We could stay up longer, do our chores later into the evening

and even read a book at bedtime.

But, it's not all good news.

All this extra light messes with our sleep.

-Having trouble sleeping, Steven?

-You know, it's funny, I am.

It's weird. Can you explain why this is?

-It's actually quite natural.

-Really?

Yeah. Until the advent of artificial lighting,

people all over the world, rich and poor, north and south,

they tended to sleep in two phases each night.

They referred to their first sleep and their second sleep.

And so they'd sleep for how long?

People would sleep for a number of hours

and then wake up some time around midnight,

usually for an hour or two.

And what would they do during that time?

Well, according to records, some people broke the law.

It was an opportunity to get up and pilfer from the neighbours.

I like a good pilfering in the middle of the night.

Yeah. People relieved themselves.

They looked after children or livestock.

Without being too explicit about this,

the advice was, do not conceive a child before your first sleep,

when you're both exhausted from the day's labour.

Wait until between the first and second sleep,

when you're already rested.

That's the ideal time to conceive a healthy child.

With artificial lighting, the fact we could stay up later

meant our natural two-sleep pattern was squeezed into one single sleep.

TOILET FLUSHES

But now, many of us suffer from insomnia.

It's not unnatural to wake up in the middle of the night.

So the insomnia, in a way,

is our body kind of reverting back to that older rhythm?

Yeah. The exposure to artificial light has physiological effects.

We are going to fall back and wake up every now and then in the middle of the night

and there's just nothing wrong with it.

One of the things that concerns me, as an historian of sleep,

is the attempt by pharmaceutical companies to convince people that,

any time you're awake in the middle of the night,

there's something wrong with you

and you need a medication to deal with that.

That is really a falsification of the human experience of sleep.

All right, I feel a lot better about my insomnia.

I'm going to try and get a little more shuteye.

Perfectly natural.

All right. Will you turn off the light?

By the 1800s, our fascination with artificial light

had created a melting pot of inventions and ideas.

But before you shout out "light bulb",

there's one other dazzling innovation

I want to explore from this time period.

And it would, once again, change the course of history.

The very poor were increasingly living

in the dark slums of America's growing cities.

One man made it his mission to shine light on their wretched lives.

It would take a flash of inspiration

for the next step in the journey of light...

That man is journalist Jacob Riis.

In the late 1800s, here in New York City,

Riis would write a new chapter in the story of light.

He creates a source of light so bright,

it allows him to capture an image and change people's minds.

Riis is investigating a slum district

called Five Points in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

It's home to poor immigrants, who'd come chasing the American Dream.

With half a million people living in just 15,000 tenement buildings,

neighbourhoods like Five Points

are among the most densely populated places on Earth.

Riis is himself an immigrant

and so the squalor he finds here appals him.

He starts taking late-night walks

through the back alleys and streets of Five Points,

peering into the lives of the people there.

These cramped, dark, unsanitary hovels

are cesspits for disease and squalor,

far removed from the day-to-day lives of most Americans.

Here's Riis in his own words -

"The sights I saw there gripped my heart

"until I felt that I must tell of them,

"or burst, or turn anarchist or something."

Riis bangs out reports for newspapers and magazines,

but his words fail to arouse public interest.

He wants to share with Middle America

the lives of real people from the slums.

Maybe a photograph would help?

Photography, at this point, is an experimental technology.

Each photograph required a single plate

and that could be expensive and they weren't very sensitive,

so exposure times were extremely long, even in good light.

So this is Riis's big problem.

He wants to photograph inside the tenement apartments,

but they're simply too dark.

What he needs is a bright, portable light source.

Throughout the 1800s,

photographers try all sorts of ways to light their photos.

A breakthrough comes with a metal called magnesium.

All you really have to do is set it on fire.

As you can see, it generates a bright light,

but it's not very stable and the fumes are really unpleasant.

But then, in 1887, two pyromaniacs from Germany

grind up the magnesium and add it to gunpowder.

This produces an explosive solution.

They call it "blitzlichtpulver",

literally, "flashlight powder".

Riis notices a small four-line article in his morning paper

all about this new flash photography phenomenon from Germany.

News of blitzlicht has crossed the Atlantic.

Could this be the innovation Riis has been waiting for?

Riis heads back down into the dark tenement hovels,

now armed with the blitzlicht flash powder.

He wants to try to light up his night-time images.

But it's a tricky and dangerous process.

All right, so what do we need to do to light this thing up?

-I'm kind of excited and terrified.

-Well, we need a flashgun.

So, this is a flashgun?

-This is a flashgun right here.

-It sounds dangerous already.

It is dangerous, of course, in the wrong hands.

We're going to put the cap inside.

Don't push that button.

OK.

I won't, I promise!

Now, this is black powder.

Black powder is a form of gunpowder.

My kids would love this. If this is what you needed to take photographs,

they'd take photographs all day long.

They just like blowing things up.

In order to get more a white flash, we add magnesium.

Keep feeling like this is about to blow up in my face.

So, that's the magnesium.

That's what's going to give the white light.

The powder underneath really kind of propels it.

Should get you some protective garment here.

Not that it protects you all that much.

-But at least it's one layer that will burn.

-OK, yeah.

Nothing can go wrong now I've got an apron on!

I look like some kind of deranged butcher.

And I'd like you to put this sleeve on.

Again, one more layer.

Right. Oh, yes! Nothing will get through this thin layer of cotton!

-Oh, it's amazing. It will only burn the cotton and not you.

-OK.

-Hold it up above your head.

-Right.

If it's above your head and the wind is blowing that way,

-you won't burn your hair.

-Oh, I see. Right.

-It's going to be up about like that.

-Yeah.

-Keep it level.

-Right.

So, that's it! So, now you're ready to fire.

Riis wants to photograph the people in the tenements

unposed and spontaneous,

so he sets off unannounced into the slums after midnight.

And you can imagine how surprising it must have been for these people

when a stranger walks into their home and sets off a small explosion.

Many of the occupants are left dazed and confused.

One account recalls -

"A blinding flash, the patter of retreating footsteps

"and the mysterious visitors were gone."

You can see how it was dangerous work.

Riis actually nearly blinded himself once and, on several occasions,

he actually set fire to the tenements

he was trying to photograph.

Riis said, "Our party carried terror wherever it went."

But, at least, he gets his photographs.

With a set of images lit by flash,

Riis publishes his photos in a book called How The Other Half Lives.

He then goes on a nationwide lecture trip,

projecting his photographs to audiences

using another light device,

a newly-devised type of magic lantern.

Jacob Riis would have loved this, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's really special to be able to project his work

this large, this bright,

because, you know, he would use a magic lantern

-which has a candle inside.

-Right.

A candle is essentially one lumen,

so he would project his work with one lumen.

Today, we have 12,000 lumens.

It's so intense to be here,

to see these images of this neighbourhood

basically projected up on the screen.

It's like we've created

the world's most depressing PowerPoint presentation.

-Yeah.

-People are walking by and shocked at these images.

But I love the idea of also public projection.

You see a lot of surprised faces around here.

Everybody is walking about, people are taking pictures.

It's art like this, video art and photography,

seldom seen on large scales like this.

Thanks to the innovations of flash photography

and the magic lantern,

Riis takes this previously invisible group of people

and makes them visible on a mass scale.

It sets in motion a dramatic change in public opinion,

triggering one of the great movements of social reform

in American history.

Thanks to Riis,

many of the city's worst tenement buildings are torn down.

A decade of improvements follows

with sewers, garbage collection and indoor plumbing.

Riis used his images to share his vision

and change the way we see the world.

One century comes up with a way to capture images in a dimly-lit room

and, by the next century,

it has transformed the lives of city dwellers everywhere.

While the photographer's flash could light a room

for a short, blinding moment,

people at this time still relied on candles and lamps

to light their way after dark.

The buzz now was to create a continuous and bright light

at the flick of a switch.

It was time for the first ever light-bulb moment...

So, how many people does it take to invent a light bulb?

You know the answer. One, right?

Thomas Alva Edison.

Well, that's not exactly true.

Decades before Edison took an interest,

inventors from across Europe and America

had experimented with and patented

a range of designs for electric light bulbs.

But the problem with these early bulbs?

They didn't last that long.

It wasn't until 1878,

almost 40 years after the first patented light bulb,

that the stage is set for the grand entrance

of Thomas Edison.

Edison is already a media sensation.

What do you think?

I've got a little Edison impersonation business on the side.

He was dubbed a wizard

for being the first person to record a voice on a phonograph.

Now, he sets his mind to the problem of electric light.

And the first thing he does is buy up an existing Canadian patent.

Here's Edison in his own words -

"I am not impressed by the great names and reputations

"of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention.

"It's their ideas that appeal to me.

"I am quite correctly described as

"'more of a sponge than an inventor.'"

This might not sound like the normal inventor mind-set.

But, by buying up patents,

Edison could build on other people's already existing designs.

People think that, by filing a patent,

they're going to be automatically rich,

they're going to make a lot of money.

But most patents end up being worth absolutely nothing.

It's the idea behind it that's important.

In the case of the light bulb,

there are, you know, dozens of patents -

people patenting parts of the invention,

people patenting the whole thing.

Many people have good ideas

that can contribute to the development of a major idea.

But they don't have all of the vision,

all the skill set necessary to do that.

So, a smart person with a bigger vision

will come along and buy up that portfolio of patents

and then use them to their advantage.

That's not uncommon in today's technology world.

With his newly-purchased patent,

Edison reckons it will only take him a few weeks

to create a long-lasting light bulb.

But it's much harder than he thought.

So, what does he do?

Edison is a master of what we now call "vapourware",

announcing a non-existent product in order to scare off competitors.

Basically, he lies.

Edison announces to the press

that he's succeeded in inventing

the first long-life electric light bulb

and encourages journalists to come see it.

Edison invites each reporter, one by one,

into a booth,

where he showcases his miraculous new invention

and discusses the merits of his design.

But only for a few minutes, max.

Just long enough to ensure the bulb doesn't blow.

And then he ushers the reporter out of the booth

and then he goes in and screws in a new light bulb

and brings the next guy in.

When asked how long his light bulb will last,

he answers confidently, "Forever!"

LIGHT BULB SMASHES

Almost!

But now Edison has to make good on his blatant lie.

Rather than work alone,

Edison employs the brightest minds of the time.

He calls them his "muckers"

and sets up the world's first research and development lab.

On top of that, he creates a new business model.

To give his staff an extra incentive,

he awards them with shares in the company.

You want as many people, creative, motivated people

on your team as possible.

Because people often think it was Steve Jobs who created Apple,

or it was Bill Gates who created Microsoft.

It was a team of people contributing to that idea

and you want those people to be motivated and have some ownership,

because they'll then do their best work for you and for themselves.

There's a sense of, if the company does well, everybody does well.

Any good manager will tell you, the way you motivate people

is to give them ownership.

They may not come up with the idea or the answer

that you thought they were going to come up with,

but they may come up with a better one.

And because they own it, they feel, "Oh, this is really exciting."

The team try out over 6,000 different materials

for the light-bulb filament.

Edison is even inspired by his old fishing rod

and gets his muckers to experiment with stuff like bamboo.

Edison becomes convinced that bamboo is the answer,

so he sends his men all around the world, one guy goes to Brazil,

one guy goes to Cuba and dies of yellow fever,

until, finally, one of his men in Japan

finds the perfect bamboo for the job.

It takes almost two years,

but they finally manage to create a long-lasting light bulb

which burns for an incredible 1,200 hours.

The first public display of Edison's incandescent light

happens on New Year's Eve, 1879.

Edison said,

"The electric light has caused me the greatest amount of study

"and required the most elaborate experiments."

Edison's light bulb is not so much a single invention

as it is a collection of small, but ingenious improvements.

By 1880, electric light bulbs go into mass production.

Edison announces that lighting our homes now comes cheap.

With spermaceti oil lamps, we got just seven hours of light

for an average day's wage.

But with electric bulbs, it was 1,200 hours for the same money.

Edison created a new kind of workspace

that would prove crucial to the next century's businesses,

the modern corporate research and development lab.

And on top of that, he inaugurated a tradition

that would be widely adopted by the technology sector,

paying their employees in shares and not just in cash.

In a sense, Edison didn't just invent technology.

He also invented a system of inventing

that would drive 20th century innovation.

It took a while for electric light bulbs to take off,

because most homes didn't have a source of electricity.

But as our cities slowly began to crackle with power,

Edison's influence spreads far and wide.

Edison's light bulbs radically change our work life,

creating the first 24-hour factories and the innovation of shiftwork.

This massively increases productivity right across the globe.

Electric streetlights cause a drop in crime

and open the night to the entertainment industry,

from music halls to the movies.

And with our homes now bathed in electric light,

it opens the door to other electrical appliances.

The washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, the food mixer

transform the role of women,

halving the hours a housewife spends on chores,

allowing many to enter the national workforce.

While Edison and his R&D team light our homes

and bring the world into the age of electricity,

there's one arena Edison actually failed to tackle in his lifetime.

CHEERING

And that was to bring light to sports.

Until the 1930s, professional sporting events like baseball games

were actually relatively small-scale affairs.

The games had to be played during daylight hours,

usually during the work week,

which meant that a big professional baseball game

might only attract an audience of a few thousand people.

To increase numbers, games would have to be played after work.

But that's when it got dark.

In his old age, Edison dreamed of lighting up large spaces like this,

but it's not a simple task.

One of the biggest challenges is there are players all over the field,

the game is very omnidirectional,

you never know which way they're going to turn.

I mean, what made it so difficult?

We have to put lights all around the field

to make sure that we minimise shadows

and we have to make sure we put them in the appropriate place

to not put them in offending zones of the batters and the players,

so they truly don't get blinded by light.

The man credited with the solution is RJ Swackhammer,

a lighting designer for Edison's company, General Electric.

It wasn't so much a technological innovation

as more the precise placement of floodlights,

plus narrow-beamed spotlights

around the irregular-shaped field,

creating an even distribution of light.

In May 1935, the first major league baseball game

played under lights

was the Cincinnati Reds versus the Philadelphia Phillies,

with an evening crowd of over 20,000 people.

So, we're here at home plate.

We've got the lights on.

So, I feel like I'm pretty well-lit.

What is it about the lighting that is so special on me here?

Light's hitting every side of you

so, no matter where the people sit, no matter where the cameras stand,

you're rendered with light on all sides.

That also helps if you're a batter.

You can see the ball being lit from left, right, forward and back.

You can see how it's turning

and whether or not you should swing low, high, left or right.

And how much power is driving this whole spectacle right now?

This is one megawatt.

One million watts,

which costs about 100 an hour to run,

where, compared to your typical house, is about 100 per month.

Despite the obvious advantages of lights,

not everyone was convinced about lighting stadiums.

The president of one club announced,

"There is no chance night baseball is going to become popular.

"The game was meant to be played in the Lord's own sunshine."

CHEERING

But soon, sports stadiums across the country

and around the world

are being fitted with lights.

The simple ability to play at night had some surprising consequences.

Lighting up stadiums effectively brought sports to the masses

on a global scale.

And it helped create the national pastime of spectator sports,

from baseball, to football, to basketball,

all the way to monster trucks.

And it turned sports

into a multibillion dollar entertainment industry.

Artificial light may have started out

as a way for us to illuminate our dark world,

but we now had the power to use it just for fun.

Garage inventors could now create lights

just to bring colour and excitement to our cities.

If there's one place on earth that's famous for its lights,

it's Las Vegas.

The city is lit up like a Christmas tree.

And everywhere you look, the vibrant glow of neon.

Now, the marriage of Sin City to its gaudy neon lights

came about by a chance encounter

with the work of a crazy French scientist.

That man was Georges Claude.

Claude is a chemist by trade,

but he cares less for academic studies and more for fantasy books.

Claude is an avid reader

of the early science fiction novels of Jules Verne,

whose tales of adventure open his mind to new possibilities.

In 1902, working in Paris,

Claude makes an accidental discovery

while studying the composition of air.

Air was known to contain around 78% nitrogen,

plus 21% oxygen

and 1% "other".

It's in these "other" gases where Claude's thirst for mystery

and his eye for a buck

collide in spectacular fashion.

So, Claude has got all these extra strange gases lying around.

And so, like any self-respecting mad scientist,

he decides to pass a current of electricity through them.

And one of those gases lights up a vivid shade of red.

That gas turns out to be neon.

Neon gas, itself, was not a new discovery,

but it had been mostly ignored by other scientists.

The fact it glows brightly when you pass electricity through it

gives Claude an idea -

he invents and patents the first neon tube light.

Claude decides to set up a stall in the streets of Paris

to showcase his amazing new electric light.

Neon, people!

Lots of neon!

Word spreads all around the world and, before long,

the orders are coming in.

And Claude can't meet the demand.

Look at this glowing colour!

You can make signs from it!

And so, to protect his invention and bring his product to the market,

he decides to embrace a new business model,

the franchise.

Franchises, and the trade secrets they protect,

dominate the world of commerce today.

It's how some of the very best ideas go global.

I get chills any time I talk about franchises.

-Really?

-I do!

-Thank God we have you on the show!

You may be the only person in the world.

Well, I get chills about it

because it's one entrepreneur saying to another entrepreneur,

"You don't have the money to do this big company. Buy into my idea.

"Put a little money down, start your own business

"and then pay me the equivalent of a royalty over a period of time."

When I was growing up, you had all of these black men,

who just had ideas,

but they couldn't get the capital from the banks.

But yet, they pooled together all their money

to buy a McDonald's franchise or to buy a Buick franchise,

or a GM franchise

and, by opening up that,

they built wealth in the community, put their kids through school,

employed the community and the wealth just spread.

That's was the most impassioned speech

about franchises I've ever heard.

I find franchises to be great business models,

when the underlying idea of it

is so powerful that it captures the imagination

of an entire community, if not a nation.

Back in 1920s Las Vegas,

Claude's neon light franchise was picked up

by an entrepreneurial sign writer called Tom Young.

Young's electric sign company still keeps Las Vegas alight to this day.

I caught up with his grandson, Jeff.

So, what brought your grandfather to Vegas?

My grandfather was born in England

and immigrated as a young man

to Utah and was a hand letterer,

was his trade.

And early on, he was travelling through this area

to see family in California

and started selling signs in Las Vegas.

How did he start thinking about really lighting up the signs?

Light and energy were such a big part of this area

because of the building of Hoover Dam.

And he thought,

all that electricity,

there's going to be an opportunity down there

to make some pretty bright signs.

With the loan of 300, Young sets up a sign writing company.

Later, he opens a branch in the still small town of Las Vegas.

Tom Young brings a completely new aesthetic and scale to sign writing.

And, at its heart, is neon lighting.

These are some of the biggest signs in the world here.

These I-beams were just massive

because it was supporting a 260-foot display.

Our plastic fabrication is back in this area.

We actually just shipped out a giant flamingo that's going downtown.

The scale is much bigger here

than you'll get anywhere else in the world.

Caesars at 165 feet.

Mandalay, Mirage, Bellagio.

We've had involvement with every casino

that you can think of in Las Vegas.

This is our glass room. I'll take you in there and show you.

By using different colour glass tubes

and even different gases,

Young creates a rainbow of bright colours.

So, for someone like you grandfather in 1920,

what is it about neon that seemed so immediately useful?

Well, at the time, light bulbs, you could turn them on and off.

But they didn't really have colour and you couldn't bend them.

You get a tube of glass

and you can bend it virtually in any shape in virtually any colour.

And there was just nothing like that anywhere

and so it just took off like wildfire.

It's a remarkable story of how different ideas and skills

came together to create something brand new.

A new technology from France

collides with an immigrant sign designer from England

in the middle of the American southwest.

Young realises that neon isn't just about light.

It could also be used to make words.

It's one of those chance encounters

that will ultimately transform the look of an entire city.

Neon light becomes the ultimate way to advertise.

Hotels and casinos use it to lure people in.

The giant neon displays are even seen as a new form of art.

These lights inspire a generation of architects

to abandon the sterile, serious designs of modernism

and embrace the playful, symbolic excess of the Las Vegas strip.

This is how change happens.

Scientists discover a new kind of gas,

which creates an amazing business opportunity,

which ultimately leads to a new artistic movement.

And every step of that journey, neon lit the way.

People like Young were now using light

to send out a bold, bright message.

But in the final chapter in the story of light,

it would be used not for illumination, as such,

more as an industrial tool.

And this time, inspiration didn't come from scientists,

but from science fiction.

Just a minute, ladies and gentlemen, I think something is happening.

From HG Wells in the 1800s,

through to Flash Gordon and Superman in the 1930s,

early sci-fi stories, comic strips and films

often used beams of light to zap people.

The innovation of what came to be called the laser

didn't actually come about in the real world

until the late 1950s and early '60s.

Not for the first time, the science fiction writers

were well ahead of the scientists.

When the laser finally becomes reality,

its first mainstream use isn't as a terrifying weapon,

but as something a little less exciting...

..scanning barcodes.

Barcodes were invented back in the late '40s by two grad students,

Bernard Silver and Norman Woodland.

They'd overheard a shop owner

wanting a way to read product information at the checkout.

Well, you'll want one of this sort, sir. Sixpence a card.

Sixpence, eh?

To read the barcodes originally took a cumbersome device

inspired by a movie projector

and powered by a large 500-watt light bulb.

But with the invention of the laser,

a different kind of light was created.

It's very pure, made from single colours of the spectrum

and can be focused to a narrow beam.

With a laser, small hand-held scanners were possible.

OK, so it may not seem like the sexiest of innovations,

but the ability to quickly and efficiently scan barcodes

transformed retailing all around the world.

Each transaction could be recorded and tracked

into the supply chain,

which meant that you never ran out of goods.

Big retail outlets were able to maintain vast inventories of goods,

which gave them a critical advantage over smaller mom and pop stores.

With barcodes and laser scanners,

retail outlets ballooned into the huge stores

that now dominate shopping malls across the world.

Lasers effectively changed the face of shopping.

Today lasers have come to enable so much in our daily life.

Lasers transform the music

and movie industry with the innovation of CDs and DVDs.

And they make an awesome stage show.

High-power lasers are behind every journey we make.

They revolutionise construction for transport, with laser cutting,

drilling and welding used in building every car and aeroplane.

And laser light transforms global communications,

as nearly every telephone call, e-mail and web search is now

carried as pulses of light through a system of fibre optics.

Science fiction might have given birth to the idea of lasers,

but they're now an essential tool in scientific research.

And if the old sci-fi fans might have been disappointed to see

lasers used for barcode scanning,

they'd be thrilled to see

what scientists have planned for them next.

This is the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility

near San Francisco.

It's here that we can look into the future story of light.

This is a high security facility.

I've been scanned and swabbed and searched.

But I'm here because inside this building, scientists have

created the most powerful laser system on the planet

and the hope is that they can use the light

to create not a death ray,

but instead a near limitless supply of clean energy.

'The goal here is to use laser light to power nuclear fusion -

'the same process that drives our sun and the stars.

'The head man is Mike Dunne.'

Fusion is the process that

drives the sun, and all of the stars,

it's the crushing together

of matter at the very smallest scale,

at the atomic scale.

It combines the hydrogen together to get helium -

and it releases energy in the same process.

The objective of this facility is to try to reproduce,

in miniature, what's happening at the centre of the sun.

And how far along in the process towards that fusion goal

would you say you are?

We're still going through the experimental journey.

In fact, today there's a major experiment under way to see

if we can get to that next level.

In the control room, the team of scientists

and engineers are preparing to fire the laser system.

When they flick the switch, a single pulse of low-power laser light

is sent off through fibre optic cables.

But then, in this cavernous room, it gets split up

into 192 separate laser beams

and their power is amplified four million billion times,

reaching a total output of 500,000 gigawatts.

The lasers then get routed down to the basement,

to the fusion reaction chamber.

You know how you see something that seems really futuristic,

and you're like, "that looks like something from Star Trek" -

it's like this actually WAS from Star Trek!

This is the Engine Room of the Starship Enterprise!

It's incredible.

So this is the heart of the whole facility, where the...

the laser beams come down from above.

We focus each laser beam down to a tiny point in space,

about the width of a human hair onto this fusion fuel.

That red dot inside the fuel cell

is a tiny droplet of frozen hydrogen.

So we're shining 500,000 gigawatts' worth of power

onto this tiny little pellet.

What then happens next?

The oven, this gold can,

converts that optical light into X-ray light,

and those X-rays crush the pellet

and they crush it really fast.

This is a million mile an hour implosion.

The atoms themselves are forced together at such high pressures,

you know, billions of atmosphere pressures

that the atoms themselves bond together,

and so we convert hydrogen into helium and give off lots

of energy - you are now standing in front of the world's

highest producing fusion device, you know,

which would absorb into your body

and, I'm afraid, you would not be walking out of there any time soon.

Countdown started - T minus 270 seconds.

Back in the control room, they're ready to fire.

So, I can tell something very important is going on in here.

You got all these computers,

and not a single person is checking Facebook!

System started, sequence ready - T minus 30.

Mission alert.

Copy.

System show sequence running at T minus 10,

9, 8,

7, 6,

5, 4, 3,

2, 1.

-We're still alive, so that's good.

-That's a good sign!

So what... What just happened?

For an instant in time, about 100 trillionths of a second,

we created, just over there, the hottest place in the solar system.

This facility is still at the experimental stage.

But someday, possibly very soon, the world could be

powered by fusion energy created by laser light.

The hope is that we can optimise this laser system

and the fuel, to get more energy coming out of the fusion process,

than the laser itself delivers.

And, if you can harness that,

then you've got an inherently clean, inherently safe

form of energy that will last for, probably, a few million years.

When you stand and look at this extraordinary machine,

you really have to pause for a second and remind yourself that just

200 years ago, the state of the art

in artificial light involved cutting up a whale on the deck of a ship

in the middle of the North Atlantic.

Yet here we are today and we're creating miniature suns on Earth.

This is the journey of light.

And it started as this attempt to just read a book

before we went to bed.

And then it became a massive form of commerce and

then it became a form of advertising

and then it became a form of art.

And now we're in this room

trying to create the next chapter in the story of light.

What started as just an attempt to illuminate our lives after dark

now may be the future of energy.